Watch Snob On The State Of Timepiece Journalism

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Self-Diagnosed Nanohorophiliac

I am afraid I have a problem and the only person who can help me is you.

I am a self-diagnosed nanohorophiliac. I am enamored with tiny mechanical watches. Beyond JLC’s caliber 101 my knowledge is inept. Please help me learn what else is out there.

The creation of extremely small mechanical movements is essentially a lost art; the caliber 101 is an exotic, bar-shaped movement only 14mm long, 4.8mm wide, and 3.4mm thick. It’s a wonder, and a wonderful movement but the basic design dates to 1929 and there has been nothing made that exceeds it, nor is there ever likely to be anything; there would be little or no market for it.

There are interesting, and more recent, ultra-thin movements like the AP 2120 and the Vacheron 1003, but again these designs are decades old, and no one is likely to make anything that will be serious challenge to those movements either.

One other movement worth looking at, however, if you are interested in miniaturization, is Corum’s Golden Bridge, which isn’t quite as tiny as the JLC caliber 101 but still quite small, and with a very interesting construction. Corum as a brand is very much a distressed property these days, and have been flailing about trying to find some sort of plausible identity for many years but the Golden Bridge remains one of the most interesting movements in any brand’s portfolio. Unfortunately for Corum the appeal is rather niche, and not enough to keep the brand from seeming simply irrelevant to most modern watch enthusiasts.

What Defines A Perfect Dress Watch?

Hi, I am looking to get a dress watch and can go as high as $12,000. I was hoping to get smaller watch, say 38" or less. Any suggestions?

What defines a perfect dress watch? Does it have to be time-only, or certain complications work well as well?

If you can go up just a bit on the price, I would strongly recommend the Lange Saxonia Thin. At 37mm x 5.9mm, with just two hands and bar-shaped hour markers, it’s the very quintessence of a dress watch and at $14,800 it is by far the least expensive, high quality dress watch out there. I know it’s over your budget but pretty much everything else in dress watches under $20,000 is vastly inferior, and with Patek asking around $30,000 for a Calatrava these days the Lange even seems rather a bargain. Another of my personal favourites in this category is the Reverso – the Tribute watches are quite fantastic and well within your means, in steel, if you want something a bit more affordable than the Lange and with, perhaps, a bit more dash.

What is a dress watch? That depends on what you mean by “dress.” For business, the rules are relatively relaxed; in the office you can get away with almost anything these days although a thin watch with a relatively uncluttered dial is the classic solution. For more formal dress codes things become more restrictive. With a dinner jacket (that is, the so-called “tuxedo”) a watch should be thin, time-only, and preferably in a white metal; yellow or rose gold detracts a bit from the monochromatic palette characteristic of the semi-formal code (which is what a dinner jacket is).

The true full formal dress code is something very few of us will ever encounter; it is white tie, and is extremely specific: a tailcoat, white tie and waistcoat, and so on. A watch of any kind is really not correct with white tie although again, if you must wear one, platinum or white gold is preferred. Nowadays men are generally laughably sloppy about this sort of thing, but then again dressing properly as a gesture of respect to one’s colleagues or host is almost as unfashionable in today’s world, as any other kind of simple good manners.

Objective Timepiece Publications

Thank you for your excellent column. I truly look forward to reading it every week and, at times, have been influenced by your recommendations in my own purchases, including with my Explorer II and my Zenith El Primero Chronograph. My only complaint is that it is only a weekly publication and a short read at that, which leads to my question... Do you have any recommendations for where a relative novice could look for objective information and reviews of wrist watches, similar to what one finds in your columns? As you've mentioned in the past, I've find that most watch reviews are little more than puff pieces including one prominent website in which the answer to the question of "would the reviewer wear it" is invariably "yes" whether they are reviewing a Vacheron or a Fossil. It would be very helpful for me if you could, given that I have no access to "hands-on" research aside from Rolex, Omega, Tag, and Tudor.

Well, it’s difficult; the various watch websites are not really in the business of offering criticism. The one you are thinking of if I read your mind aright, is not entirely puff pieces – they have some quite good information from time to time – but consistent expression of strong personal views are not their stock in trade. “Objective” is an interesting notion; should critics or reviewers be objective? The answer is “yes” in terms of a reviewer not having conflicts of interest, but I think one also wants, from any critic, a point of view, otherwise the whole point of criticism is lost. No form of consumer journalism is entirely objective in the former sense, unless you are reading an amateur blog that accepts no advertising.

If you want to become more educated about watches, you will have to learn to pick out useful information and the best way to become good at filtering out junk information quickly, is to develop a solid base of your own knowledge. Watch writers are generally extremely careless about technical and historical accuracy, but the classic books in the field of horology by people like George Daniels will inoculate you as well as you can be against the vast tide of what for lack of a better word, is horological bullsh*t.

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